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Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Research Paper on Erik Eriksson

Research Paper on Erik Eriksson

Erik Erikson was born in Frankfurt, Germany on June 15th, 1902. His biological father was an unnamed Danish man who abandoned Erik's mother before he was born. His mother, Karla Abrahamsen, was a young Jewish woman who raised him alone for the first three years of his life. Erik's mother married Dr. Theodor Homberger, Erik's pediatrician and moved to Karlsrune in southern Germany. The development of identity seems to have been one of his greatest concerns in Erikson's own life as well as in his history. During his childhood and early adulthood he was known as Erik Homberger, his parents kept the details of his birth a secret. Erik was a tall, blonde, blue-eyed boy who was Jewish. At school, Erik was teased for being Nordic, but at grammar school kids teased him for being Jewish.

After graduating high school, Erik was really concentrating on becoming an artist. When Erik wasn't in art classes, he would be wandering Europe while visiting museums and sleeping under bridges.

When Eric was twenty five, one of his friends, Peter Blos (an artist and later a psychoanalyst) gave him the idea of applying for a teaching position at an experimental school for American students run by a friend of Anne Freud's. Erik received a certificate in Montessori education and one from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Anna Freud psychoanalyzed Erik. While teaching there, he met Joan Serson, a Canadian dance teacher. They had three children and one of those children became a sociologist. Erikson was offered a job at the Harvard Medical School and was able to practice child psychoanalysis privately.

Later on, he taught at Yale, and later at the University of California at Berkeley. During this time, he did his famous studies of modern life among the Lakota and the Yurok. When Erik became an American citizen, he officially changed his name to Erik Erikson. It is still unknown where he got the name from.

In 1950, Erikson wrote Childhood and Society, which contained many summaries of his studies among native Americans, analyses of Maxim Gorkiy and Hitler, a discussion of the "American personality", and the basic outline of his version of Freudian theory. These themes won him the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Erik Erikson is a Freudian ego-psychologist (he accepts Freud's ideas as partially correct, but he includes the more debatable ideas). Erikson often pushed the instincts and the unconscious practically out of the picture.

Erik is most famous for his work in refining and expanding Freud's theory of stages. He believed that functions by the epigenetic principle (this principle says we develop through a predetermined unfolding of our personalities in eight stages). Our progress through each stage is determined by our success, or lack of success in all the previous stages. A great analogy of Erikson's stages is it is like an unfolding rosebud, each petal opens up at a different time, and in a certain order. If we interfere in the natural order of development by pulling a petal forward too early, or out of order, we will completely ruin the development of the flower.

Each stage has developmental tasks that are psychosocial in nature. The different tasks are referred to by two terms. The infants task is called "trust-mistrust". Erikson made it quite clear that there is a balance we must learn which is "certainly, we need to learn most trust, but we also need to learn a little mistrust, so as not to grow up to become gullible fools!"

Each stage has a certain optimal time. There is no use trying to rush a child into his/her adulthood (which is quite common among parents who are obsessed with success). It is not possible to slow the speed or try to protect kids from the demands of life. There is a certain time for each task. If a stage is achieved, you carry a virtue or psychological strength which will help you through the stages. If you don't achieve anything, you may endanger your future development. If you are successful at each stage of development in Erikson's model, our lives later on will be full of self-confidence, having led a complete life, and a sense of satisfaction. If we are not successful at each stage of development in Erikson's model, our lives will be full of depression, lacking fulfillment, and having a sense of failure. Erik Erikson died in 1994. He was a very successful theorist!

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